speech impediment, which sounded more like Gilda Radner's famous "Baba

Wawa" impersonation on Saturday Night Live. Blame it on the generation gap: Only a few in the mostly young crowd laughed.

"We threw in Friends for the younger audience," Knapp says.

Hayward and Knapp chose pilots, rather than the more memorable episodes, for reasons of simplicity.

"They

do a good job of introducing the characters, their relationships, where

the drama is going to happen, the tension, the conflict," Knapp says.

"Even if you've never seen Hogan's Heroes," Hayward adds, "everything you need to understand about [the show] you get in the pilot."

Their

chosen sitcoms all exemplify what Knapp calls "the surrogate family,"

be it roommates, nosey neighbors or even prisoners in a World War II POW

camp. This is something the husband-and-husband team, who met in

Chicago and have been living in L.A. for seven years, knows all too

well.

"The whole point of Friends was the surrogate family," Knapp says. "And that's what Three's Company was about. I Love Lucy

also had a very unusual family situation: It had mixed cultures; she

was the first woman to be pregnant on TV. These are some groundbreaking

things."

After October's Golden Girls pilot episode-- the only episode in the show's run without cheesecake -- Hayward and Knapp plan to do a rendition of A Christmas Carol, starring Roseanne as Bob Cratchit, the Golden Girls as the ghosts and Fred Mertz as -- who else -- Scrooge.

They're

also tossing around the idea of having their Facebook followers vote

for upcoming sitcoms, as well as writing an original one with recurring

characters. Maybe sock puppet improv.

In this age of fractured

digital entertainment, with viewers getting what they want to watch at

the hour they want it, Hayward and Knapp are just hoping to make

watching television -- even it is played out by sock puppets -- a communal

experience again.

"There's something powerful about taking TV and

making it live," Knapp says. "Bringing it out from the boob tube and

out from the living room into public and interacting with those

characters that you identified with or fell in love with or hated. There